Assembly election results

For once I have no hesitation in agreeing with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s observation on the latest round of assembly elections in five states that, “The polls have made it clear that the BJP’s ideology is being accepted, appreciated and supported by more and more people in the country.”

Sure enough the latest round of polls have finally and demonstratively established the BJP as a party with its footprints across the nation and its president Amit Shah, along with Modi has succeeded in what the main establishment mouthpiece ‘The Times of India’ gleefully announced, “A Congless India” which in Modi and Shah’s words means “Congress Mukt Bharat,” they have been aspiring for all along.

This is truly a victory of BJP ideology, which is, “Hindutva! “Bharat Mata ki Jai” and not “Jai Hind,” “Gau Mata ke hatyaron ko, goli maro saron ko” and “Mandir wahin banayenge” and nothing beyond pure communal poison and covert Manuvad. It is another thing that the neo converts to this Hindutva ideology now includes the beef eating people of West Bengal, North East, including Assam as well as those from Kerala.

Exactly 20 years back a two-time former Deputy Speaker of Lok Sabha G G Swell while speaking on a vote of confidence for the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee rose and said that while he greatly admired Vajpayee and would have gladly voted for him he won’t because his party the BJP may ban consumption of beef if returned to power.

Then it was merely an apprehension. Today it’s a realty. Forced vegetarianism has surreptitiously become a fait accompli in most parts of the country and will progressively spread across parts of South, East and North-east, as well. They were saved hearing Raag Tori or Bhindi early morning so far because there was no BJP there. But the people of North-East, Bengal and Kerala have voted the BJP after witnessing the two years of Hindutva rule under the saffron brigade and yet, evidently more and more people desire it. So why not!

Of course the BJP is a smart party which learnt some good lessons from its reverses in Delhi and Bihar. Surely the Congress continues in a state of permanent stupor and the Left dare not make any serious introspection into why its entire support base in their fortress slipped out from under their feet. But it is equally true that the BJP succeeded in fully consolidating the anti-Muslim vote in Assam on the oft tried slogan of exterminating the Bangladeshis (read Muslims) and the Muslims, in those 34 constituencies where they had a clear majority, remained divided between the Congress and that BJP creation Badruddin Ajmal and his AUDF.

Thinking people have all along suspected that the likes of Ajmal and Owaisi are financed and encouraged by the BJP to capitalize on Muslim insecurities and grievances against the secular parties’ rather lackadaisical attitude towards their concerns, which grievance, one has to admit, is not without a basis.

By and large it is assumed and very often proved by voting patterns that Muslims are the most politically conscious community and in the face of a BJP threat, they know how not to divide and squander their vote which would naturally help out a communal BJP. But that is not what happened this time in Assam and earlier in Maharashtra. Modi and Amit Shah succeeded first in 2014 in creating a fear psychosis against Muslims in greater parts of the country including UP and Bihar on the false slogan of ‘Love Jihad’ and swept the two states in the Lok Sabha polls. That experiment was successfully repeated in Maharashtra and now in Assam yet again it worked in the name of Bangladeshi ghuspathias (intruders).

At a press conference at IWPC soon after the 2002 pogrom of Gujarat its former DGP R B Sreekumar and Modi’s bête noire regretfully informed the media of the undercurrent of hostility or fear of Muslims that even his leftist friends in Kerala felt and therefore commended Modi for teaching Muslims a good lesson.

Surprisingly it takes so little to whip up communal fear and hostility in the majority community against Muslims and then in that communal frenzy no one seems to bother about what Modi has done for the poor, for the industrial workers, for the Dalits, the OBCs, to which category he claims to belong, and most of all farmers, committing suicides, in his two year Central and even before that as Gujarat chief minister for all of 12 years. Large parts of the country is reeling under the drought with large scale migration of rural population from the countryside to the cities because there is no water—not just for drinking but no water, period. And the Government in a belated move after being berated by all and sundry makes this big tamasha of sending water trains to Latur and Bundelkhand and it turns out many of these trains are empty. Meaning the tankers inside are not carrying anything least of all water. But the people of India are unmindful of these antics, or rather appreciative of such tokenism. In which case “Jaso Praja taso Raja” roughly translated to “you get the ruler you deserve.”

But that does not diminish the responsibility of the Muslims to defeat patently communal Muslim outfits like the AUDF an unapologetic BJP agent. The process of creating an alternative in AUDF to divide Muslim vote started almost a decade back.

Owaisi at least did not celebrate and distribute sweets over the victory of BJP in Maharashtra, but this Gujarati perfume merchant was shamelessly celebrating the BJP victory and virtually turned a spokesperson of the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying that since Modi became the Prime Minister he has done nothing against Muslims and therefore by implication is the best bet for the Muslims. As stated above it doesn’t surprise those who recall that Ajmal was a political creation of late Pramod Mahajan and in the 2011 elections, which incidentally Arun Jaitley boycotted half way, Mahajan’s one time confidant and committed RSS backroom boy Sudhanshu Mittal was financing the AUDF.

Suddenly pretending to be a well-wisher of the Muslims, he told journalists at an evening tea get together at Kalraj Mishra’s residence then, how it was necessary to help create a Muslim leadership to protect Muslim interests and it is now evident that by and by this strategy has started paying dividends. It worked in the 2014 general elections and again this time and from the jubilation in AIUDF office one can safely assume that the numerous meetings Ajmal held with Modi were quite profitable to both.

It is time the Muslim community got out of its ghetto mentality and stopped thinking in narrow sectarian terms. It is time for them to see that the threat from the BJP and Sangh parivar is not merely communal but fascist and it is not the responsibility of the secular and democratic Hindus alone to fight against the forces of fascism. It is time for them to see, identify and make common cause with the concerns of the Dalits, Tribals, forest dwellers and OBCs against this oppressive fascist Manuwadi oppression which in effect the BJP represents. It is time for them to plunge fullyand whole heartedly into the growing reservation agitation,though on the face it, it does not seem to benefit the Muslims directly. The problem also lies with the leaders of the Dalits and OBCs who are no Ambedkar, not even Kanshi Ram. They merely make sporadic feeble noise against Manuwad at the time of elections and then forget all about it. They have failed to create a far reaching movement. Not even Mayawati cared to go that far.

In Bengal too the Muslims as also most rural poor, seem to have evidently fully abandoned the Left and migrated lock, stock and barrel to the Trinamul Congress camp, notwithstanding that phoney Mamata Banerjee. Her numbers show that there are others too who have chosen to back Mamata ignoring all the apparent instances of Trinamul tyranny, lawlessness, corruption and misgovernance. It is a dangerous trend. Mamata and BJP are two sides of the same coin. Mamata patronized the likes of Sultan Ahmed to take out processions in Kolkatta against the hanging of Jamaat Islami leaders who had massacred so many innocents in the Bangla Desh liberation war. It only brought disgrace to the Indian and even more so Bengali Muslims. Such events naturally strengthen the communal BJP argument showing up all Muslims as supporters of those fascist elements, resulting in complete marginalization of the Left and secular, democratic forces.

It’s a dangerous trend. The Muslims being the biggest minority of the country have a serious responsibility to keep away from the likes of Ajmal, Owaisi and Sultan Ahmed. Otherwise the day is not far off when more and more people would justifiably drift towards the BJP resulting eventually in one party BJP rule. By then no Mamata, no Ajmal and not even Owaisi would be around to fight for Muslims.